The GFX View

[Zapper1]

I am looking for any suggestions, comments, and helpful direction to some really good mods in orderto make my forums look, function and preform better. I am not a coder and am learnig as many functions that go with being an admin for a vb board. So please understand that before you really slam me on how my board is setup please.

My board is primarially setup for the GFX arena. I have once section that is for gamers just to allow members to talk gaming talk.

http://thegfxview.com/forum/index.php

Zapper

[cheat-master30]

Okay, first of all, since you asked for mod recommendations, my first recommendations are going to be extremely obvious... you need a gallery (Photopost or Photoplog or Coppermine or something) with forum integration and various categories for art to be uploaded to (which is excellent for a graphics forum). You should also use that mod which gives a list of user created albums made in vBulletin, and maybe a few mods for fun, which I have no idea about.

Secondly, the style looks pretty nice to me, so well done. It also looks very much professional and suiting to the topic.

You may however want to fix this forum description for the large picture forum:

Designs that are smaller larger than 500 x 500 pixels.

You do however have way too many forums for a new board. Maybe condense the not used gaming forums into only those that are being used now, and have a general gaming board to go with it instead? Many others are likely a bit un needed at the moment as well.

Next improvement I'd make would be to make some forums public, since people really do not like members only to view everything forums, and at the moment there is nothing for guests to see or for search engine spiders.

Also, put the CSS in an external file rather than the header of the document to save major bandwidth, since you'll need it with the detailed images your members are submitting and wasting tons of bandwidth on how the forum is styled rather than the images isn't the greatest idea.

On the positive however, the signature and avatar contest stuff is ideal for this kind of board, and it does seem like if the few things I mentioned are improved that the forum will do well.

1- your domain is not occupied but with a construction page, it's time to update...
2- you're a graphix site with a 3rd party style... not representing your own work... told over and over that this is not helping .

3- overall content will be good... try to focus on topics not already covered by other gfx sites.

[Shelley_c]

Being a graphic orientated forum I would have expected a custom style designed by yourself though it's no big deal I would have personally went out of my way to design my own style.

Commenting on the style, I'm not an avid fan of dark styles and I find this style very dark making it difficult to distinguis the forum style designs against the background colour. Again, not your fault, you never designed the style.

The scrolling affilates script can be a little annoying and repetitive but that's just my little grievance.

To suggest what kind of hacks/mods would be pointless. That is something you would need to decide for yourself and what kind of hack would be beneficial to your forum and/or members.

Overall the quality of the style is good though dark styles ain't my thing. Before i forget, I noticed that there's still default sub forum icons present and the navbar icon is default so I would suggest in designing something custom.

[cheat-master30]

Ah yes, I didn't know it wasn't a custom style until I looked at the footer copyright. Always recommended to use a custom style for a graphics or design forum topic creator.

And as usual, put something useful at the domain root. Maybe an actual website, because it could be an important part of competing with the hundreds of other design forums out there?

[Zapper1]

Thank You all for the comments and sugestions. I will be working to meet goals for my forum that are required to be competative with others.